Adolf Harnack · 20 of 21

Appendix to Chapter VI. The Ideas of Redemption from the Devil, and of Atonement through the Work of the God-Man

§ 1. Christ’s Death as Ransom and Sacrifice.

The Greek Fathers did not go beyond, nor could they give a more consistent form to, the views on this subject already expounded by Irenæus and Origen. The fact of the incarnation was so closely and exclusively connected, at least in the East, with the conception of the result of redemption, that everything else had to yield in importance to the latter. Of course at all times and in all directions the attempt was made, after the example of Irenæus and the indications of Holy Scripture, to insert the facts of Jesus’ history in the work of redemption. This can be seen especially in Athanasius and the two Cyrils—“Whatever happened to his humanity has happened to us.” Again, the death of Christ was frequently recalled when the forgiveness of sins was taken into account; but it is difficult here to draw the line between exegesis, rhetoric, and dogmatics. As a rule, we obtain the impression that theology could have dispensed with all the facts of Christ’s life. On the other hand, the death of Christ always appeared so tragic and wonderful an event, that men were compelled to attribute a special saving value to it. But just as it was not represented in art up to the fifth century, so the majority of the Greeks really regarded it, along with Christ’s whole passion, as a sacred mystery, and that not only in the intellectual sense. Here thought yielded to emotion, and imposed silence on itself. Goethe said towards the close of his life, “We draw a veil over the sufferings of Christ simply because we revere them so deeply; we hold it to be reprehensible presumption to play and trifle with and embellish those profound mysteries in which the divine depths of suffering lie hidden, never to rest until even the noblest seems mean and tasteless.” That exactly represents the Greek feeling. It also gives the key to the saying of Gregory of Nazianzus (Orat. XXVII. 10) that the appreciation of the sufferings of Christ was one of those points on which it was possible to make a mistake with impunity (cf. Iren. I. 10). By this he meant, not only that the specific result of the passion was uncertain, but also that it was inexpressible. It was reserved for the Middle Ages and our modern times to cast off all modesty and reverence here.

Yet a few theologians and exegetes could not refrain from speculating about the death of Christ, though they did not yet use frivolous arithmetical sums. The death of Christ was, in the first place, connected, following Rom. VIII. 3, with the condemnation of sin—death—in the flesh (κατακρίνειν τὴν ἁμαρτίαν (τὸν θάνατον) ἐν τῇ σαρκί). That constituted the strongest connection of Ensarkosis (embodiment in the flesh), death, resurrection, and redemption, reached within the Greek Church. In Christ’s final agony the Ensarkosis first came to some extent to its end, for by death the flesh was purified from sin and mortality, and was presented in Christ’s resurrection pure, holy, and incorruptible. This thought was worked out in various ways by Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Cyril of Jerusalem, as well as, especially, by Apollinaris. But in later times the conception of the complete hypostatic union forbade the vanquishing of corruption (ϕθρά) and death being dated a moment later than the assumption of human nature. Therefore it was held that Christ had even at the incarnation destroyed corruption and death (the penalty of sin) from the flesh; but his death was wholly voluntary and economic.

In the second place Irenæus had already, in a connected argument, emphasised the necessity of tracing the incarnation of the Logos and his passion to the goodness and righteousness of God, and he further insisted that Christ had delivered us not from a state of infirmity, but from the power of the devil, redeeming those estranged from God, and unnaturally imprisoned, not by force, but with due regard to justice. Origen, however, was the first to explain the passion and death of Christ with logical precision under the points of view of ransom and sacrifice. With regard to the former he was the first to set up the theory that the devil had acquired a legal claim on men, and therefore to regard the death of Christ (or his soul) as a ransom paid to the devil. This Marcionite doctrine of price and barter was already supplemented by Origen with the assumption of an act of deceit on the part of God. It was, in spite of an energetic protest, taken up by his disciples, and afterwards carried out still more offensively. It occurs in Gregory of Nyssa who (Catech. 15-27), in dealing with the notion of God, treats it broadly and repulsively. We find it in Ambrose, who speaks of the pia fraus, in Augustine and Leo I. It assumes its worst form in Gregory I.: the humanity of Christ was the bait; the fish, the devil, snapped at it, and was left hanging on the invisible hook, Christ’s divinity. It proves that the Fathers had gradually lost any fixed conception of the holiness and righteousness of God; but on the other hand, it expresses the belief that the devil’s power will not first be broken by the future appearing of Christ, but has been already shattered by his death. In this sense it is the epitaph of the old dogmatics which turned on eschatology. For the rest, Gregory of Nazianus and John of Damascus felt scruples about admitting God and the devil to have been partners in a legal transaction.

With reference to the sacrifice of Christ, Origen was of epoch-making importance. On the one hand, he started from Rom. III. 25 and similar texts, on the other, he was strongly influenced by the Græco-oriental expiatory mysteries, and was the first to introduce into the Church, following the precedent set by the Gnostics, a theology of sacrifice or propitiation based on the death of Christ. He thereby enriched, but at the same time confused, Greek theology. He taught that all sins required a holy and pure sacrifice in order to be atoned for, in other words, to be forgiven by God; this sacrifice was the body of Christ, presented to the Father. This thought which, as expounded, approximates to the idea of a vicarious suffering of punishment, was adopted by Athanasius who combined it with the other ideas that God’s veracity required the threat of death to be carried out, and that death accordingly was accepted by Christ on behalf of all, and by him was destroyed. The idea that only the sacrificial death of God could vanquish death which was decreed by him, and thus conciliate God, occurs also in other Greek Fathers of the fourth century. Following the estimate formed of the infinite value of the final passion of the God-man, we constantly find in them also traces, sometimes more, sometimes less, distinct, of the thought of substitution in connection with satisfaction; but it remains obscure, nay, it is frequently again withdrawn. In other words, it was sometimes twisted, as already in Irenæus, into the idea of example pure and simple. Thus the Antiochene school especially, who held his death to have been a natural event, considered that Christ’s final passion influenced our freely-formed resolutions, but this version is not entirely wanting in any Greek Father. Others, e.g., Gregory of Nazianzus, explained that God did not demand the sacrifice—or ransom—but received it δι᾽ οἰκονομίαν. In this case, as much as in earlier times, δι᾽ οἰκονομίαν meant “that the Scriptures might be fulfilled”; that is, it was tantamount to abandoning a direct explanation of the fact itself. In any case Cyril of Alexandria shows most clearly the vicarious idea of the passion and death of the God-man in connection with the whole Christological conception. Eusebius’ method of formulating the idea comes nearest Paul’s, but it is only a paraphrase; and the inability of theologians to recognise, expose and dispute the differences in their divergent conceptions is the strongest proof that they were not clearly aware of the bearing and weight of their own propositions.

§ 2. Christ as man the Mediator.

The West, which had a scheme of its own in Christology, (see below) also possessed characteristic features in its conception of the work of Christ. Here, as in almost all departments of activity in the Latin Church, it was of the highest moment that Tertullian, the jurist, and Cyprian, the ecclesiastical ruler, were the first Latin theologians. Disinclined for philosophical and strictly religious speculation, and dominated by a prosaic but powerful moralism, the Latins were possessed from the first of an impulse to carry religion into the legal sphere. The sacred authorities, or the Symbol, were regarded as the “law” (lex) of God; divine service was the place where the censure of God was pronounced; the deity was thought of as judge. Father, Son, and Spirit were held to be “personæ” who possessed a common property (“substantia” not “natura”). Christ as the “persona” who controlled a two-fold “property,” one inherited from his Father (his divinity) and one from his mother (his humanity). Christ required to be obedient to God, and—as Tertullian first said and Cyprian repeated—had to satisfy God (deo satisfacere). In this phrase everything was comprised: man—the Christian—was to give God that which he owed him, i.e., he was to satisfy God’s legal claims. After this came the “promereri deum”, i.e., rendering services to God, gaining God’s favour by our merits. But in Tertullian and Cyprian “satisfacere deo” meant more precisely to atone for wrongs inflicted on God by acts of penitence, and to appease him (placare deum, satisfacere deo per hostias: Arnobius). Further “promereri” was applied above all to bona opera, works (fasting) and alms-giving (Cypr., De oper. et eleemos.). Even from the middle of the third century an ecclesiastical system was drawn out in the Latin West of works to be rendered to God (order of penance); and this system gradually took in, like a net, all man’s relations to God. It was throughout governed by the idea that the magnitude of transgressions and that of the works rendered to God, the penitential offerings, were to have a strictly legal relation, and, similarly, that what a man’s merits entitled him to from God had a fixed and regulated value. It is not the case, as has been supposed, that this idea first arose in the Church in the Romano-German period, and is therefore to be described as a result of German criminal law. On the contrary, the idea of satisfactiones and merita already belonged in its entirety to the Roman age, and during it was strictly worked out. From the days of Tertullian and Cyprian the Latins were familiar with the notion that the Christian had to propitiate God, that cries of pain, sufferings, and deprivations were means, sacrificial means, of expiation, that God took strict account of the quantity of the atonement, and that, where there was no guilt to be blotted out, those very means were represented as merits. All those trivial definitions, which betray a low state of legal and moral views, and which one would gladly attribute to barbarous nations, had become the property of the Church before the incursion of the Germans; and Anselm’s principle, “Every sin must be followed either by satisfaction or punishment”, can be already shown in Sulpicius Severus, and corresponds to the thought of Cyprian and his successors.

But Cyprian also applied the “satisfacere deo” to Christ himself. As in the Middle Ages the most questionable consequences of the theory and practice of penance reacted on the conception of Christ’s work, so from the time of Cyprian the latter was influenced by the view taken of human acts of penitence. His suffering and death constituted a sacrifice presented by Christ to God in order to propitiate him. This thought, started by Cyprian, was never afterwards lost sight of in the West. The angry God whom it was necessary to propitiate and of whom the Greeks knew so little, became more and more familiar in the West. Jewish and Pauline traditions here joined with those of Roman law. Hilary is especially clear in combining the sacrifice of Christ with the removal of guilt and of punishment. This combination was repeated by Ambrose, Augustine, and the great popes of antiquity; least certainly, perhaps, by Augustine, who being a Neoplatonic philosopher and profound Christian thinker, was also familiar with other and more productive points of view. The distinctive nature, however, of this Latin view of the work of Christ, as the propitiation of an angry God by a sacrificial death, was characteristically expressed in the firmly established thought that Christ performed it as man, therefore, by means, not of his divine, but of his human attributes. The Latins were shut up to this conclusion. Their views regarding the work of Christ had been influenced by the works of penance enjoined by the Church, and on the other hand, the latter owed their value to the voluntary acceptance of suffering. Again, “sacrifices” in general were something human—God does not render, but receives sacrifices. Finally, mankind was in God’s debt. From all this it necessarily followed that Christ in presenting himself as a sacrifice did so as man. But with this conclusion the Latins severed themselves from the supreme and final interests of Greek piety—for this rather required that the deity should have assumed with human nature all the “passiones” of the latter and made them its own. If the rigid Greek conception, which, indeed, in after times was full of gaps and inconsistencies, represented Christ’s sufferings as a whole to be not voluntary, but the complete acceptance of the Ensarkosis (life in the flesh), yet God is always the subject. On the whole, therefore, the conception of sacrifice is really alien in the view of the Greeks to the strict theory of Christ’s significance. It found its way in through exegesis and the mysteries, and threatened the compactness of the dogmatic conception, according to which everything that Christ did was summed up in the complete assumptio carnis (assumption of the flesh). Nor was the alien view able to shake the fundamental conception that the God-Logos was the subject in all that pertained to Christ. Among the Latins, on the other hand, the idea of the atoning sacrifice plus substitution is genuine, and has no general theory against it; for they never were able to rise perfectly to the contemplation of Christ’s work as the assumptio carnis, an expression of the loftiest piety among the Greeks. Those of the latter who, like the Antiochenes, either did not share or only imperfectly shared the realistic idea of redemption, referred, it is worth remarking, the work of Christ, like the Latins, to the human side of his personality.

Great as are the distinctions here—the West did not possess in antiquity a definite dogmatic theory as to the atoning work of Christ. Greek views exerted their influence; and, besides, Western Christians were not yet disposed, with a very few exceptions, to trouble themselves with thoughts that had no bearing on practical life.